Personality Secrets to a Long Life

Researchers Find Centenarians Optimistic, Extroverted, Positive; Some Became That Way Later in Life

By Kathleen DohenyWebMD Health News

Reviewed by Laura J. Martin, MD

May 30, 2012 -- A new study may offer some tips to help you stick around for your 100th birthday.

Try to be optimistic, easygoing, sociable, and conscientious. Don't bottle up your feelings. Suppress the urge to talk ill of others, the new research suggests.

That combination of personality factors seems to describe the secrets of living to 100, says researcher Nir Barzilai, PhD, director of the Institute for Aging Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, N.Y.

Those findings are among the latest from Barzilai's ongoing Longevity Genes Project.

While Barzilai found that those personality factors offer more clues to longevity, he has a caveat: "Still the No. 1 predictor for being a centenarian is if you have parents who are centenarians."

Even so, he is trying to answer the question: "Are the genes that are longevity genes also personality genes?"